Welcome to the Future

This week in class we are talking about the Future of the Internet.  In preparation for class, we are reading the UK Future Internet Strategy Group's "Future Internet Report - May 2011".  In this report, the group charged defines the future of the Internet, the opportunities and challenges faced moving forward toward this future, and what the UK can do to prepare for it.  The group defines the "Future of the Internet" in terms of three emerging components: combined service offerings, shared data amongst services, and a revamped network infrastructure.

Combined Service Offerings:

As the Internet grows and expands so grows the number and type of devices that are connected to it.  Sensors and mobile connected devices and items are becoming a more integral part of the Internet and the way it is utilized.  With so many connected devices, a new type of data is being collected:  sensor collected data.  In conjunction with human entered data, sensor and device data can be used to provide a better picture of the services utilized and customize your service offerings at lower costs at anytime.  Also with this increase of data comes the breaking down of barriers between systems to make the data needed readily accessible to the person who needs it and not stored in an isolated system.

Shared Data Management:

More companies than ever are collecting data about your web browsing and purchasing history.   They turn around and use that data to customize your experience with their services or sell it to other companies to do the same.  As more and more services combine, lots of data is being passed back and forth.  This can be good, and this can be bad.  One of the main concerns with storing all your data in a readily available packet of information is the security used to move the packet from place to place and the controls to determine who gets which piece of data.  How this process develops will be a big driving factor for what services can go to a cloud environment and which ones need to stay on-premise.  Another aspect of the shared data component includes centralizing access to ease service integration into an already developed access control system.

Revamping the Network:

With scenarios for communications (machine-to-machine, machine-to-man, and man-to-machine) increasing, the network that these communications move across needs to be growing and scalable too.  More and more of the data provided to end-users are large on-demand, real-time products, and the network needs to be able to handle that much information as quick as possible.  Also a large wireless network needs to be created and implemented to maintain an always-connected environment, but this also comes with challenges such as the handling of wireless spectrum interference and the need for broadly accepted IPv6 implementation.

I feel that this report accurately represents where the Internet is going: a centralized, cloud-based service provider.  I am excited about the progress being made, but I'm also hesitant about being "there" now as there is not a lot of legislation developed yet to consider the consumer's wants and needs versus the wants of the service provider.  This report, while mentioning a few big names in their case studies, also did not look at the big stake holders currently highly invested in the Internet such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple, and how their choices as companies would effect the Internet "market" and how it grows. 

The topics that we are covering in my MIST7500 class go hand-in-hand with this report.  We've so far reviewed cloud-based service offerings.  We've implemented many integrated services.  And coming up later in the semester, we will be looking at different networking technologies.  This class covers a good bit of the leading edge technology currently being developed and utilized while showing you where we've been too.

Where to next?